Abnegation – My Mother

Has anyone ever read the Divergent series by Veronica Roth?
Well, in this dystopian young adult book, the society is divided into 5 factions:

Abnegation : The Selfless
Dauntless : The Brave
Erudite : The Intelligent
Amity : The Peaceful
Candor : The Honest

When I read about how people lived in the abnegation faction, it grated on my nerves how nice they were. I mean, I’m all for kindness and love, but the degree of their selflessness was exhausting.

And now, people, I have realised that I’ve been living with an abnegation.

My mother.

She has possibly got to be the most selfless person I know. She’s an english teacher over at my school, in a place where everyone is looking for people to dump their work on. The one person who always says yes?

My Mother.

Honestly, I don’t know how she does it. She’s already got loads of corrections to do, she teaches grades 6th to 9th (that’s two classes per grade, mind you) and she’s basically the foothold everyone finds to give all their work to.

My school board has just introduced ASL, [I am not aware about the A, but the S and L stand for speaking and listening], and my school principal is basically my english teacher. So, it his job, you know, to take the speaking and listening skills. Apparently there’s this new rule that the teacher teaching the class can’t take ASL for them (which I highly doubt so yeah, OK, don’t take our ASL, but for God’s sake find another teacher.

My mom is loaded with work, she has to make an average of marks accounted by 40 students in 5 subjects, she has to take care of my brat of a sister, she has papers to fill and forms to collect and stuff to pack, and now she has to take my speaking skill.

I should be thrilled, right? This would seem like a free ticket to getting full marks in ASL. But no, I am not relieved. It is excruciatingly sick and I’m tired and bloody irritated about how the staff of my school take my mother for granted. They respect her, yes (as they’ve said countless times) but they still take her for granted. And it’s like she has a physical disability and can never, and I mean never, say no to these people.

It’s a quality I love about her – her faith in God and faith in herself and that no matter how much work she has, she can accomplish it, is what gives me my strength. But it gets very, very..gah, I can’t describe it. Try a mix of irritated, on the verge of breaking someone’s face, full of anxiety, troubled, angry. Mostly angry.

My mother, people, is the perfect abnegation. Maybe more so that the characters in the book. And while I love her for it, I can see why I am not abnegation. Someone needs to keep her from going off the map trying to save others who are going off the map. Or something.

Wonderous Lot To Be Said About CBSE

So there is a wondrous lot to be said about the Central Board of Secondary Education [CBSE].

DISCLAIMER: I mean no harm, physical or otherwise to the obviously dedicated staff of CBSE, or those who very blindly love them and follow them. I come in peace, and shall do so without violence, because I value Gandhian secularism.

Now that that’s out of the way, I need to get it off my chest – I have a lot to say about how horrible, horrible, horrible, I find CBSE. This could be for a variety of reasons.

a) They have introduced, along with a 200 page literary companion and a BBC Compacta, an unabridged version of The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller, which is frankly far too much, coupled with the formats needed to be learnt for letter writing, reports, essays, dialogue, description, process, notice, message, email, and various other means of communication that hardly anyone uses in the twenty-first century. To 15 year olds. Nice.

b) The all new PSA (Problem Solving Assessment) was introduced for the first time in the history of this syllabus when our finals were only a month away, and that accounts for a hefty percentage of our GPA.

c) Every task that the teachers have us do, CBSE wants proof that the student has performed and deserved the marks given to them by their teacher. This is completely okay for papers and written tasks, but when it comes to speaking skills, and acting out prose, they want full videos recording each and everything the student does and says.

I’m not sure if this is a practice in other boards or something, but I find it extremely annoying, especially when it’s us students who have to get our own cameras and record our videos and then file them away in a USB and provide our teacher with everything ready made, when we obviously have better things to focus on.

d) This teeny bit I personally dislike because I hate math in general, so it may not be the board that’s got the problem – maybe this is the way math is in every other curriculum or syllabi.

The prescribed textbooks that we have contain sums that we can easily do, but then there are guides that contain much harder stuff, and their concepts are completely different and there are a few extra formulae to learn which aren’t provided in the official textbook.

I know, yawn.

Thus, I conclude by saying that CBSE is not my cup of tea for various reasons. There are many more, but I’d rather not bore you to death by delving into them.

All I can say is that I’m glad I’m taking IB Diploma Programme my junior year.

How I spent my day at home all alone

This is possibly a ramble about school, because studies are involved. I stayed at home all alone today, promising my parents I would pour my heart out into studying what I naturally suck at (political science and math). So the moment I got up, things didn’t go quite the way I’d planned.

First off, I slept again. Yes, curled under my comforter with the heater making my room warm and cozy, and dozed off. It’s my mother’s fault. She should’ve switched the heater off before she left. Gah.

Then, I got up at 9.a.m, and forced my legs to the bathroom, which I suspect were made out of lead at the time. Freshened up and all, and promptly opened my virtual game and started playing it. Then came to mind my hideous political science textook.

Yawn.

I was forced to close my game, go grab my book, and laboriously learn what it contained for two and a half hours before I could finish even a chapter, because my mind simultaneously wandered off in various forked directions without my consent. I finally finished that one chapter, yawned some more, texted my friend about hating politics, and am now supposed to be doing some math.

But instead, I sit here, typing this. Because I can’t bring myself to go back and sit in that chair and stare at that book for the umpteenth time in my life since my sophomore year started.

I should be really serious about this, since my finals are like, a week away, but I just can’t find it in me.

Will go force my fragile mind to do some calculations, now. Will post something that makes everyone happy later, after my sad, sad, exam experience comes to an end. After which I will be free and happy, away from scary equations and variables.

For a month and a half, anyway.

Why I Won’t Take Chemistry Next Year

I really, really like chemistry. I mean, I know I Want to like it, but there’s always something that makes it so unbearably hard. I get what it is that I’m reading, but after skipping to the next topic, the one I studied before? It has magically disappears into the world of Oz through a silent invisible tornado I totally didn’t see coming.
It isn’t as if I can’t remember stuff-I can. I learn literature summaries and math formulae and biology terms – and I remember them.
But for some twisted reason, chemistry equations are with me one moment and gone the next. It’s so irritating, I end up closing the book and throwing it across the room at the periodic table which just hangs there and mocks me repeatedly.
I loath organic chemistry. The difference between Ketones and Aldehydes is not something I can’t google if I want to be a chemist or a scientist (which I don’t, thank god for that) and it’s not like chemistry sticks to just one rule. It’s always bending them this way and that, which is I think is bullshit and should stop right now.